GEOFFREY NUTTALL Geoffrey Fillingham Nuttall 1911–2007 Formative influences GEOFFREY F. NUTTALL, ecclesiastical historian, was born 8 November 1911 and died 24 July 2007. Although it was his achievement as a histor­ ian, especially as an ecclesiastical historian, that ensured his election to the British Academy in 1991, he was educated as a classicist and he became a minister of religion. Pastoral ministry remained his vocation. To all outward appearance he followed a conventional career for a man of his background. His father was a general practitioner in a rising health resort. On both sides of his family there had been generations of parsons, professional men, superior tradesmen and prosperous farmers. Several of them were JPs. All were the sort to provide civic ballast for country towns nationwide. Geoffrey Nuttall took great pride in this. His understanding of it informed his work as a historian. His roots encom­ passed Cumberland, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Yorkshire. They were small­town and rural but they incorporated a broader urban experience: Edinburgh, Liverpool, London, Manchester. As with all such families, there was vicarious satisfaction in grand, if ill­defined and distant, connections (the Listers of Gisburne, Barons Ribblesdale) and in links with industrial paternalism (Sir William Hartley, the jam manufacturer, was ‘Cousin Jam’; he was in fact Nuttall’s second cousin twice removed).1 There was a closer link with an intelligent bishop, 1 Sir William Hartley (1846–1922). See D. J. Jeremy, ‘Hartley, Sir William Pickles (1846–1922)’, in D. J. Jeremy and C. Shaw (eds.), Dictionary of Business Biography: a Biographical Dictionary of Business Leaders Active in Britain in the Period 1860–1980, 3 (London, 1985), pp. 96–9. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, XIV, 441–465. © The British Academy 2015. 442 Clyde Binfield F. R. Barry, Bishop of Southwell, whose wife was Nuttall’s second cousin once­removed.2 Nuttall’s own generation maintained this solidity. His elder brother, James, was a chartered accountant with Pilkingtons, the glass manufac­ turers. His younger sister, Evelyn, was responsible for Girl Guide training centres in the golden age of the Guiding movement. For himself, there was prep school (run by an aunt’s husband), boarding school, Oxford (he was inordinately proud of being a Balliol man) and the Church. He looked the part. He was the scholar parson incarnate, refined in voice, manner and appearance, more wiry than frail, searching in gaze, reflective, quizzical and more than capable of firm judgements. He was not a renaissance man because he had neither much knowledge of, nor much interest in, science, but in all other respects his mind was richly furnished. He was at ease in Dutch, French, German, Italian and Welsh, as well as Greek, Hebrew and Latin. His literary appreciation ranged from Dante and Erasmus to Rilke and Virginia Woolf; he wrote on each of them. He had a keen aesthetic sense: his evaluation of three French cathedrals—Amiens, Bourges and Chartres—was vividly, even radically, catholic. He visited Chartres: ‘It was May, and Mary’s month’. The cathedral was ‘as dark as Amiens is a palace of light . the relatively low piers in the nave looked like working men carrying the slenderer columns, the seers and prophets, on their shoulders as they soared . The flying buttresses just cannot contain their delight at sustaining this place, where the Most High has come amongst men.’ He went on to Bourges. There he found ‘room to breathe . but it is not of man’s pride in his accomplishment that the cathedral speaks, but of a place for the ordinary man . You feel secure, as in a family party at Christmas. The cathedral is like an old­fashioned envelope with many flaps . [T]he love of God envelops you, not straining to lift you heaven­ wards as at Chartres but coming to meet you on your own level.’3 It is almost as if a worker­priest, now in his mid­seventies, has come home. Nuttall was a passable pianist, an agile conversationalist and an inde­ fatigable correspondent. He kept his friendships in careful repair, tailoring his letters to the interests of each correspondent: a genealogical spine, perhaps; inimitable reminiscence, certainly; comment on the current aca­ demic and ecclesiastical scene; clear­eyed advice, not always easy to take; 2 For Frank Russell Barry (1890–1976), Bishop of Southwell 1941–63, see The Times, 25 October 1976. 3 G. F. Nuttall, ‘Briefly’,The Friend, 144 (27 June 1986), 814. GEOFFREY FILLINGHAM NUTTALL 443 and an over­arching pastoral concern. He exercised a powerful epistolary ministry, and it was reciprocated. There was, however, an unexpected twist to each turn of this thoroughly conventional life and background. Its motor was Protestant Dissent. It has become increasingly hard to appreciate the power behind this motor. If the integrating force in Geoffrey Nuttall’s life was his Christian faith, that was given colour, accent and attitude by his family’s tradition of religious Dissent unbroken since the earliest eighteenth century and probably since the seventeenth century. It was significantly Baptist but pri­ marily Congregational. The many parsons in his family tree were Dissenting parsons. His grandfathers, a great uncle by marriage, two great­great­ grandfathers, one great­great­uncle by marriage and two great­great­ great­uncles were Congregational ministers. Several were prominent in their denomination and each provided an intersecting point for an intel­ lectually and politically articulate web of connection. There were few Congregational or Baptist families of note with whom Geoffrey Nuttall could not claim relationship. He belonged to a national establishment in constant critical and sometimes radical dialogue with the National Establishment. His family also bridged Old and New Dissent. His prep school head­ master uncle belonged to a notable Wesleyan clan; Cousin Jam, of course, was a Primitive Methodist; and in Geoffrey’s boyhood the Nuttalls wor­ shipped at St John’s, the Wesleyan church close to their house. Indeed his father became a Circuit Steward. That might explain the place of hymns in Geoffrey’s life, and especially of Charles Wesley’s hymn, ‘Come, O Thou Traveller Unknown’, sung to the tune Peniel. This Methodism had its Quaker counterpoint, which owed something to his Quaker boarding school and rather more to his Quaker wife. Nonetheless Geoffrey Nuttall remained a Congregationalist in all essentials, even though in 1972 he became a minister in the United Reformed Church, a union of the Congregational Church in England and Wales and the Presbyterian Church of England, joined in 1981 by most of the Churches of Christ. It was his instinctive Congregationalism, however, which allowed Nuttall to get within the skin of Baptists, Methodists and Quakers. It explained the cast of his history writing. It was the unifying factor in his cultural, professional and spiritual life. This can be seen in his immediate background, the parents and grand­ parents of the man. His paternal grandfather, James Kirkman Nuttall (1839–1900), sustained an energetic ministry in a succession of demand­ ing pastorates (Bradford, Sunderland and Liverpool); he was relatively 444 Clyde Binfield unusual among Congregational ministers in his support for the Keswick Movement.4 His maternal grandfather, James Muscutt Hodgson (1841–1923), a Glasgow graduate with doctorates from Edinburgh and Glasgow, combined pastoral, administrative and teaching skills. For forty years he taught theology in Manchester and Edinburgh. For him, as for his grandson, Congregationalism ‘claimed and evoked personal adventure in spiritual things’.5 Hodgson had a lively mind and a characterful wife. Geoffrey Nuttall warmed to characterful women. His mother, Muriel Hodgson (1880–1931), was an Edinburgh graduate (1900), educated at Whalley Range, the Manchester girls’ high school established by her father, and teaching for a while at Wentworth College, the Bournemouth girls’ school established by another notable Congregational minister, J. D. Jones.6 After her marriage she channelled her gifts into the education of her children: She gave me my first lessons at home and instilled in me a love of history (and later ecclesiastical history), and would herself read books that were interesting me at school, e.g. Froude’s Erasmus, so that we could discuss them when I came home; she also read poetry, e.g. Tennyson, aloud to me, encouraged me to love birds and flowers, and taught me to play the piano and to knit. Her death from cancer at the age of 50, when I was 19, was the hardest thing I have had to bear.7 In due course her son dedicated his first and weightiest book,The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (1946), to her: ‘Matri translatae primitias iamdiu sponsas dedicat filius’.8 Geoffrey Nuttall’s father, Harold Nuttall (1871–1949), was also out of the ordinary. He too was an Edinburgh graduate, intending to become a medical missionary, and for a while he served in Edinburgh as the Student Christian Movement’s Inter­Collegiate Secretary (1897–8).9 He was one of those fired by enthusiasm for the evangelisation of the world in their generation. His son did not warm to that aspect of missionary imperial­ ism but in common with his generation he was steeped in more general admiration for missionary endeavour. Grandfather Nuttall’s sudden 4 Congregational Year Book, 1901, 198–9. 5 Congregational Year Book, 1924, 97–8. 6 For Jones see S. M. Berry, ‘Jones, John Daniel (1865–1942)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34234, accessed 7 May 2015. Nuttall’s sister Evelyn was later a pupil at Wentworth. 7 ‘Some Autobiographical Notes compiled by Geoffrey F. Nuttall at the request of the British Academy August, 1991’, 1–2.